From Owen Gleiberman’s “Drive, He Said” Variety essay: Quentin Tarantino “certainly needs to address the Kill Bill car scandal in a far more detailed and confessional manner. Because he’s in the murky middle of it, obviously, but also because Tarantino is in a position to shed light on how the vertiginous power dynamics of Hollywood operate, and how they might now change.

“There’s no denying that the car incident didn’t just happen out of ‘negligence.’ It was the result of a recklessness, an arrogance, a so-ingrained-it’s-taken-for-granted pattern of unchecked aggressive male dominion in the film business. Seen against the backdrop of #MeToo, against the pileup of accusations and a landscape that’s shifted, overnight, to a policy of zero tolerance, the Kill Bill incident looks, perhaps, like a second cousin of harassment: the cold exploitation of talent by those who surely knew better.”

Gleiberman adds that Tarantino “[is] not accused of sexual harassment — but he was, of course, very close to Harvey Weinstein, so the question of what he knew and when he knew it, and what responsibility (if any) he holds for enabling Weinstein’s behavior, remains relevant. Tarantino has already spoken out on these matters, in an October interview with The New York Times that seemed, at the time, to keep the world at bay. He may now have to say more.”